Finding Happiness, Focus, and Productivity No Matter How Busy You Are

The Free-Time Formula (2018) is a practical guide to better time management, addressing a problem we’ve all grappled with: the feeling that there just aren’t enough hours in the day to do the things we value most. These blinks show that the problem usually isn’t time itself but perception. Once we reframe our concept of time, Jeff Sanders argues, we can start setting realistic priorities and getting the most out of our days.

Busy professionals

Workaholics

Self-development aficionados

Jeff Sanders is a public speaker and personal coach who lives by the ideals he preaches. An avid early-riser, marathon-runner and committed vegetarian, Sanders is one of today’s most effective self-optimizers. The Free-Time Formula is his second book, following his bestselling debut, The 5 AM Miracle.

Finding Happiness, Focus, and Productivity No Matter How Busy You Are

Synopsis

The Free-Time Formula (2018) is a practical guide to better time management, addressing a problem we’ve all grappled with: the feeling that there just aren’t enough hours in the day to do the things we value most. These blinks show that the problem usually isn’t time itself but perception. Once we reframe our concept of time, Jeff Sanders argues, we can start setting realistic priorities and getting the most out of our days.

Key idea 1 of 9

Getting the most out of your waking hours is about prioritization, rather than enjoying your “free time.”

We often divide time into separate compartments. On one hand, there’s the time we devote to the things we have to do, above all work. Once that’s done, we get to enjoy our free time, or so the thinking goes.

The problem, however, isn’t that you don’t have enough time off – it’s that the very concept of “free time” is false. The reality is that you’re already free to do whatever you want with your time. But wait, that can’t be true – after all, you have your job and family, right? Well, yes, but when you get down to it, there’s nothing really stopping you from quitting your job and leaving your family; it’s just that most people don’t!

In truth, there’s no such thing as free time. What you have are the hours of the day when you’re not sleeping. And if you want to start getting the most out your time, you should be thinking about all your waking hours. That brings us to the first key point about time management: learning to prioritize and beat procrastination.

But prioritizing is hard. Whether it’s the overwhelming number of possibilities on offer or that impossibly long to-do list you carry around with you in your head, there are distractions lurking around every corner. The more you set out to get done, the easier it is to wind up not doing anything. This comes down to the fact that the human brain just isn’t very good at multitasking. In fact, it works best when you just prioritize one task.

In fact, one of the biggest time-management challenges in existence – procrastination – is closely related to poor prioritization. Say you’ve got an important project that needs wrapping up by the end of the week. If you don’t prioritize it, push it to the top of your agenda and get down to work right now, you’ll inevitably end up wasting half the week watering your office plants, surfing the web and getting bogged down in the minor details of some event that’s coming up in two months. Needless to say, leaving your most important tasks to the last minute is deeply counterproductive.

So how do you learn the art of prioritization? Well, that’s exactly what we’ll be looking at in the next blink.

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